Newspapers reported on the existence of this super-injunction this week, when Parliamentary Privelege was used to reveal that it forbade identifying Goodwin as a banker.

On the face of it this made no sense – he’s obviously a banker and no online papers have removed old articles saying this.

So the superinjunction must have covered something else. And some people are claiming he had an affair. How do I know this? Because if you type “Fred Goodwin affair” into Google, you see results about that – including a wikipedia result that says “The super-injunction also prevents reporting of Fred Goodwin’s affair with a colleague, which began shortly before and continued during the credit crunch …” (See the original of this post for screenshots.) (Update: the wikipedia entry has been edited back and forth several times to remove and reinstate this claim).

As ever, if the super-injunction is dealing with an alleged affair, no one has told Google about it.

This story on Guide Fawkes’s blog also deliberately all-but-identifies Goodwin (and the comments on the post make this explicit – I don’t know whether he moderates them or not).

There is also a comment on the Independent website under the story about Fred Goodwin’s super-injunction that alludes to the alleged affair (again, I don’t know if the Indy moderates these):

If the superinjunction is in place to stop publication of an alleged affair, it is finished. The claims are out in the open – in Google, on social media sites, on newspaper sites, on Wikipedia and on popular blogs (there are more than I’ve listed here).

Presumably the tabloids’ lawyers are applying for the super-injunction to be overturned now if it is about this.